By pulverizing hard rock, the new bit with two rotating cones brought faster and deeper rotary drilling – transforming the petroleum industry worldwide.

History notes many men who were trying to improve bit technologies at the time, but Hughes and business partner Walter B. Sharp made it happen. Just months before receiving a patent in 1909, they established Sharp-Hughes Tool Company in Houston.

After several years of experiments, Hughes and Sharp introduced the novel drill bit suited for deep boring through medium and hard rock, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

"Instead of scraping the rock, as does the fishtail bit, the Hughes bit, with its two conical cutters, took a different engineering approach," explained ASME in 2009 — when designating it as an Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.

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Biographers note that about the time Sharp and Hughes were developing their bit, Hughes had a chance meeting in Louisiana with another inventor trying to improve drilling technology.

Hughes ran into Granville Humason in a Shreveport bar one evening in 1908. Humason had tried unsuccessfully to sell his bit design to drillers. He showed Hughes a wooden model made with spools.

Humason, who said his idea came to him one morning when grinding coffee, described meeting Hughes during a 1951 interview now in the collection of the University of Texas Briscoe Center for American History.

In the center's oral history recording, Humason says Hughes "bought my idea and paid me $150 for the idea, and I stood in the bar with the oil boys, and I spent about $50 in the bar."

While waiting for approval of the patent in 1909, Hughes and Sharp had a machine shop manufacture a prototype bit to test in the field. Their secret drilling experiment took place near Houston.

In June, the partners loaded their newly cast steel bit on a horse-drawn wagon and took it to the Goose Creek oilfield, according to historian Donald Barlett.

After stopping at an oil well that had defied conventional drills, the men ordered field hands away and secretly brought out the bit and attached it to the pipe stem of the rotary rig. For the next 11 hours, the bit bored through 14 feet of solid rock, "a feat so miraculous for the time that drillers dubbed the mysterious device the "rock eater."

Production models of the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company coned bit became a crucial (and exclusively patented) tool for drilling deeper wells, beginning in Texas and then around the world.

The foundations of the Hughes fortune had been laid, noted Barlett in a 1979 book. "Exactly what role, if any, Humanson's spools may have played in the final design of the rock bit is impossible to determine today."

When Walter Sharp died in 1912, Hughes bought the rest of the company, changing the name to Hughes Tool Company. Hughes died in 1924 at age 54 of a heart attack in his company's Houston offices.

With the money earned from the drill bit patent, 19-year-old Howard Hughes Jr. expanded the oilfield fortune while making movies, setting aviation records and helping build much of Las Vegas. Hughes Tool engineers invented the tri-cone bit in 1933.

Drill bits today rely on the design principles introduced by the 1909 Hughes patent – one of the greatest inventions of the petroleum industry. Help preserve U.S. petroleum history, please give to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. Go to http://www.aoghs.org.

"Making Hole" is a term for drilling coined long before oil or natural gas were anything more than flammable curiosities. Bruce Wells is the founder of American Oil and Gas Historical Society, a 501C3 nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of oil and gas. He is a former energy reporter and editor who lives in Washington, D.C.